THE leaders of 10 NHS organisations have called in an open letter for a ‘new page to be turned’ in 2014.
Powerful organisations including the BMA, the RCN, the RCM, and Royal College of GPs signed the letter and said that there should be a ‘balance’ between recognising strengths and the need for improvements.
The letter stated: ‘This week, at one of the most pressured times of the year, hundreds of thousands of dedicated NHS staff throughout the country will be providing high-quality healthcare to millions of patients – something that often got lost amid last year’s headlines,’ the letter said.
‘Can we, as organisations representing the NHS frontline, call for a new page to be turned as we start a new year? … leaving “fear, blame, recrimination and demoralisation” behind, and going forward with energy and optimism.’
The call shows that the NHS unions and the medical profession are rock-like in their defence of the NHS, and are determined to improve what is an excellent service and also bear no malice to Labour and Tory governments.
After all, what has happened to the NHS is not an accident. It was these governments that were responsible for introducing the NHS market, the PFI schemes for enriching the banks out of the NHS budget, and the dash to Foundation Trust status, which produced the Mid Staffordshire NHS disaster, and a number of others.
It is understandable that NHS organisations should make the plea to turn a new page in 2014. Unfortunately the call will fall on deaf ears and the anti-NHS campaign that disfigured 2013 will in fact be stepped up in 2014, when a mass of NHS district general hospitals are due to be closed, while huge chunks of the NHS budget are to be handed over to the private sector.
In fact, the Tories are on the march to end the NHS as a service free at the point of need, starting with migrants.
On Monday, Unison condemned the government for introducing health charges for migrants saying that, ‘The NHS is not there to act as border control and NHS workers are not there to act as an agency to verify British citizenship.
‘The NHS is there to treat sick people. If people are sick then the NHS should do all in its power to help them.
‘If the government has issues with immigration it has to deal with those separately.’
However, the government has made clear that charging at A&Es is just the start and it also plans to charge for other NHS services, such as minor surgery carried out by a GP and physiotherapy referred through a GP.
It also intends to introduce a new system for identifying and recording patients who it says should be charged for NHS services. There are to be NHS identity charges.
The BMA in its New Year’s message predicted the NHS was heading for a shortfall of £54bn.
The BMA’s Dr Porter said: ‘The numbers overall are so bad that if the NHS were a country, it would barely have a credit rating at all.
‘The Nuffield Trust has estimated that if the NHS budget continues to keep pace with general inflation, there will be a shortfall of between £44 billion and £54 billion in England by 2021/22, unless there are productivity gains.’
Dr Porter writes that NHS staff have borne the brunt of the government’s attempts to find efficiency savings, with £5.8 billion delivered through reducing tariff payments or cutting staff pay through freezes, despite warnings that neither are a ‘sustainable form of efficiency gain’.
He added: ‘A senior NHS leader warned recently at a policy gathering that efficiency savings would not be enough in the years ahead, and that the NHS would need to “take out capacity”. That translates as cutting services to patients.’
2014 is going to see a speed-up of the daily attacks on the NHS with some very big cuts made. What is necessary for the NHS trade unions and the unions as a whole is to turn a new page themselves.
They must stop all of the NHS cuts. The best way to do this is through organising a general strike to bring down the coalition and bring in a workers government. It is this page that the unions must turn to!
